Comment by tony | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tony | Hacker News Reader

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I don't understand the end game of what their current system is trying to achieve. I think they're trying to avoid splitting / division while hitting economic quotas (which they can't do without international commerce!), to spite everything else. It feels reduced to that.

What if China were to read through https://europa.eu/european-union/sites/europaeu/files/docs/b... and:

- remove GFW

- fix environmental issues / smog

- let regions with different realities self-govern, so it's still a country, but joined by commonality and principles Sun Yat-Sen would agree with

- cooperate on big picture things, e.g. currency, health insurance/regulation, customs, legal basics

- focus on human dignity, employment, labor rights, social security, beefy pension plans

- being able to regulate against price gouging, corruption, etc

- bring back traditional Chinese characters

What's wrong with China working closer to the way HK or Taiwan operates but having a constitution / system like EU?

Why would they want to go backwards. Anyone who has spent sometime in China will understand that it's stripped Hong Kong and Taiwan far behind.

And this just leaves me scratching my head

- bring back traditional Chinese characters

I'm not sure what the motivation behind this is or if it's just due to a lack of historical awareness. Simplified Chinese characters were introduced as a way to improve overall literacy in the country to decrease the barrier for education. It was a smart move. If other regions want to preserve traditional characters out of tradition that's totally cool but overhauling the simplified character system would be again going backwards

If it's handwriting, maybe Simplified writing can serve as a way to write notes. But with computers and standardized education everywhere, why?

Please understand, the simplified Chinese conversion was done at a time where literacy was low worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/literacy

There is more context at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simp...

This was the dearest point I had. You can even call the other points facetious or an overall thought experiment.

That's why I take great pride in my work on Cihai (https://cihai.git-pull.com/), which makes characters preserved through the Unicode Consortium's UNIHAN project more accessible. They will be ready and waiting to be implemented once again.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

In fact, our computers everywhere around the world reserve the codepoints of even ancient, now unused Chinese characters. UNIHAN also covers the ones used in Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese also (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la...), and variants across them. And there are also reservations for bagua and yi jing hexagrams.

I hope China pulls the plug on this Simplified writing experiment. Chinese is a very beautiful language!

Going back to traditional characters was a strange addition to the list. But why would the other things there be going backwards? I don't see how those are mutually exclusive with economic success.

>bring back traditional Chinese characters

The Japanese people, through their democratically-elected representatives, chose to simplify many of their Kanji characters[0].

Should Japan also be forced to bring back traditional Japanese Kanji characters as well? What about Singapore[1]? I'm a little lost on which countries need to bring back their traditional characters and which needn't.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_Chinese_characters

I'm not familiar with Singapore or Japan.

I think it's a different topic at that point, not familiar with anyone advocating it in this thread or anywhere else.

They probably have different rationale behind simplification though. Even then, it was before the advent of computers / IMEs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method)

China knows its shit. It becomes the current hub of world trade/manufactures, not for the points you listed, but:

1. GFW, to create their own national champions that is CCP's to control and boost their internal economy.

2. Loose environmental regulations and labor protections.

3. Marketing Economy with Chinese characteristics.

So pretty much the opposite of what you described. China adopts the raw parts of capitalism, and makes a cheap but efficient run of it. That is what gets to what it is today. \

Follow that school of thought, the Chinese leaders probably far from done with their capitalism experiments as of yet, for that capitalism is working so great for then. All the negative impacts haven't yet arrived there, so their intuition would be play it harder and harder, up their R&D spending, climbing up the global value chain, etc.

Until they reached the stage, when the capitalistic side effects start to show on themselves and destabilize their rule, they would not stop.

The Hong Kong today should ring the warning bell for the CCP.

They do work on environmental issues and smog like almost no one else. There is a strong realization that pollution should be curbed, and progress is visible on the span of a couple years. Also there is a progress in garbage sorting and recycling. Provinces have a high level of autonomy, country and municipalities work hard on making health insurance and services more accessible for everyone. Therefore, at least half of your points are already in works and progressing fast. People tend to think too much of stereotypes about China. Regarding traditional characters - this will never happen, there is so much content already using the simplified ones (even idea to do that sounds ridiculous).

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